Mountain View, California — Internet giant Google on Tuesday opened its Google Voice telephony management application service to all users in the United States interested in adopting a single telephone number for all of their phones, as the company withdrew the requirement for prospective users to receive an invitation in order to sign up for the service.
Google Voice — The online call routing and voicemail service has apparently attracted more than a million users during an invitation-only test phase and Google was bracing for a flood of interest on Tuesday as it made the service public.
Introduced in March 2009, Google Voice was earlier available through invitation only. Google Voice product manager Vincent Paquet said that the time has come to let everyone try the service.
“Today, after lots of testing and fine-tuning, we are excited to open up Google Voice to the public, no invitation required,” product managers Craig Walker and Vincent Paquet said in a joint blog post.
“We are delighted to see the progress we have made with Google Voice over the last few years, and we are still just scratching the surface of what is possible when you combine your regular phone service with the latest web technology,” Walker and Paquet, said in a blog post. “It is even more amazing to think about how far communication has come over the last couple hundred years.”
Google Voice offers users with a unique phone number that, when dialed, will ring over multiple other phone numbers, for instance a mobile number, an office number, and a home number, — to complete the call. It also provides settings that allow call routing to be limited at certain times of the day.
In addition to empowering users with one phone number that rings at all of their telephones, the service converts voice mail or text messages into email and allows for toll-free calls to the United States and Canada.
Paquet said the Google Voice team is operating on a concept to port existing phone numbers to Google Voice, though that capability is not ready yet.
Because not everyone wishes to have a new phone number to stuck-up with, Google Voice can be employed just for online voice-mail, without the call diverting capabilities. But Paquet said he has been pleasantly surprised to discover “that most people are desirous of the Google Voice number.”
Other features include low-rate international calling, personalized greeting messages, the ability to forward SMS messages to an e-mail account, call blocking and screening, conference calling, and mobile apps.
In an online video describing Voice, Google promised “less annoyances and more awesomeness — for free.” Voice threatens to challenge global Internet telephony star Skype.
People in the United States can sign up for the service online at google.com/voice.
Google assures that the service works “irrespective what kind of phone you have or which carrier you use.”
To get a better sense of how Google Voice works, check out this two-minute video from the company: